My-Serendipity.net - Echoes in the Silence

The dream he was having had been completely inappropriate, but nice. Whoever was calling him before 10 o’clock in the morning the night after a big party should have reconsidered. Tove answered the phone, reluctantly, with little more than an aggravated grunt. That really had been a great dream.

"Is Melissa with you?" was the shooting huff from an obviously annoyed little sister.

"Kaylen, for the love of…do you know how tired I am?" He wasn’t really, just anxious to get back, if he could, to his dream.

"I’m serious! Is she with you?"

"So am I!" he shot back. Was it too much to ask to not get yelled at first thing in the morning? It seemed like a good time to state the obvious. "No. She is not with me. Melissa is at Mom and Dads, in Hayden’s room, where she’s been since you both arrived."

"No. She’s not." Kaylen was still huffing saying each word as if it were its own sentence. "Her room is empty – no clothes, no Kona, no her, AND no truck."

"Kay," he sighed. "Think about it. First, why would she be here when she’s staying there? Second, she probably got a page and took off not wanting to wake anyone up. Have you looked for a note?"

"First, you know why. Second, we can’t find a note."

As confusing as her ‘first’ was, he skipped over that to focus on the second. It really wasn’t like Melissa to not let someone know where she was. "Keep looking. I’ll get dressed and come over."

In the time it took him to throw on some clothes and make the short drive, the Kaylen had begun ransacking the house for a note in between calling her cell phone and hanging up on her voicemail. "I’m sorry your sister got you over here," David apologized. "I’m sure it’s nothing, but she woke up in a mood." From a nearby room the men heard an exasperated grunt and shrugged their shoulders.

"It’s ok Dad. I’ll call the coordinator for the search team," he offered. "She’ll know if Melissa was paged or not." David agreed as Tove flipped open his phone, scrolled through the contacts list and dialed, forgetting there was a minus three hour time difference until a yawning voice answered the phone.

Apologizing for the early call before introducing himself, he briefly explained the situation. Karen told him she hadn’t paged Melissa since before she left home earlier in the week. She offered to page her and Tove accepted before hanging up, knowing she would never ignore a page from the team.

"Ok, here’s the deal," he offered to get the groups attention. "Karen didn’t page her for a call, but she is now so she’ll call in. I think I was the last one to see her last night and she seemed alright." Kaylen nearly snorted, but was ignored. "Did anyone call Cecilia to see if she might be headed to meet Hayden?" As everyone shook their heads, he realized there might be a possibility he and Hayden were adopted. He allowed himself an internal laugh before dialing George’s dutiful assistant and queen of all travel needs.

Always happy to hear from Tove, Cecilia told him she was sorry, that she hadn’t heard from Melissa but that they were trying to get Hayden home early. "George feels terrible he missed the party," she sighed. "I haven’t been able to get him on a flight since they reopened the airports this morning. I don’t want to tell him I’m trying in case it doesn’t work out."

There was a ball forming in the pit of his stomach now, and he didn’t like the feeling it brought. "Keep trying for me, will you Cecilia? Send him to Toronto if you can and as soon as you can. Also, when he’s available, ask Hayden to call my cell phone. Don’t mention anything about why I called. I don’t want to worry him. This is probably nothing." That last part was more for him and wasn’t very convincing.

Cecilia could hear the twinge in his voice and hated how much it sounded like Hayden when there was trouble. She agreed to have him call and tried to disguise her own worry in the process.

Tove disconnected and hit a speed dial number. One ring…two rings…three rings… "Hey! You’ve reached Melissa’s phone. Heaven knows what she’s up to but her hands are probably full. Leave a message and I’ll beep at her until she calls you back!" He left a message and hung up. It was on and in an area with a cell signal or it would have gone right to voicemail without ringing.

As the family continued to look for a note in the mess that was the party aftermath, Tove paced until his phone rang. "Hello Karen. What did she say?"

The line was quiet and the ball grew larger in his gut. "I’m sorry Tove, she didn’t answer. I paged the whole team. She’s the only one who didn’t call in. No one’s heard from her. What should I do?"

"Stay by your phone for now." The family had heard the phone and returned to the kitchen. "Call me if you hear anything."

Ignoring the chorus of "What did she say?’s" and "What do we do?’s" he hung up and scrolled through his contacts one more time. Finding the number he needed, he dialed, unsure of what to say as his family looked on.

"Hey Eric, its Tove. Listen, have you or Beth heard from Melissa in the last 12 hours?" Listening intently, he walked to the kitchen cabinet and pulled out the telephone books. "We finished cleaning up around 2am and she said she was headed to bed." He talked while grabbing a piece of note paper and scribbling a note to his family. "I don’t want to worry you Eric, but I think we might have a problem…"

He looked at the eyes focused on him, put the note on the table next to the telephone books and walked to the other room to continue his conversation. There was a brief pause before they were all in motion again.

Start calling hospitals. I’m calling the police.

~*~*~*~*~

Hours had passed with no word from Melissa. The local hospitals didn’t have her or anyone who matched her description. Pages from Karen had gone unanswered. Eric had checked with Beth and his parents, no one had heard anything. The local police said she was an adult and couldn’t be classified as a missing person because she didn’t answer her cell phone.

Tove and his dad had resorted to driving around town looking, but for what they didn’t know. When his cell rang showing Hayden’s number, he pulled over to talk.

"Hey, Cecilia said you wanted me to call. Great news! She got me on a flight home in a few hours." Hayden was cheerfully rambling which only made Tove feel worse. "Everything is still delayed here, but at least I have a seat and a flight number. Thanks for the text yesterday. It helped to know where her head was when I talked to her."

His heart raced and he tried to hide it. "You talked to her?"

"Yeah, it was after 2am her time. She didn’t say much. She sounded pretty tired."

"What did you talk about then?" Yes, he was probing, but also protecting.

"She just wanted me to talk, so I told her about the last few days and what I still had coming up. I told her…well… we talked about when I got home." Tove could hear his brother smiling as he talked and debated telling him what was going on. "I told her I’d call her tomorrow but instead I’m going to call her from the airport and ask her to pick me up. She’d love that, right?"

"Yeah, she would," he answered, hopefully with some conviction.

"I should make it before she heads home and I can make that drive with her. Shoot! I gotta run. Come to Mom and Dads tomorrow when you get up. I’ll tell you about the trip."

With a click of the phone he was gone. "He said she was tired and didn’t want to talk, only listen," he told his dad. "When she left me last night she seemed better, so what happened to make her pack up and go?"

"You didn’t tell him."

"What do I say? I know you can’t do anything and you’re a couple of thousand miles away, but we can’t seem to find your wife. If that were you, if Mom was…" he couldn’t say the word. "If you didn’t know where Mom was and you had no way to look…"

"Point taken," the older man said quietly.

As Tove put the car in gear and pulled back out into traffic, a chirp came from his phone. Flipping it open he read the short text message and spun the car around.

We found the note